


Those Who Favor Fire

by celeste9



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Apocalypse, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-16
Updated: 2014-05-16
Packaged: 2018-01-25 05:52:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1634984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/celeste9/pseuds/celeste9
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Starling City falls with smoke and flame, with the earth trembling and shaking beneath their feet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Those Who Favor Fire

**Author's Note:**

> For au: apocalypse on my Trope Bingo card. Title from Robert Frost.

When it comes, there isn’t anything they can do. It isn’t a man Oliver can fight, or, indeed, a person at all. 

Starling City falls with smoke and flame, with the earth trembling and shaking beneath their feet. The streets rip apart and the buildings crumble to rubble and dust. The rest burns.

There’s a poem, Felicity remembers. _Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice._ Robert Frost.

She looks out at the city that was once her home and thinks that’s about right.

-

Oliver went to find Moira and Thea. Felicity and Diggle haven’t seen him since.

Felicity itches for something to do, for some way to help, to stop this, but she knows that there is nothing. Even if she could get a computer to work this isn’t something she can fix.

They do their best to help the wounded, the ones who aren’t too far gone, the ones who aren’t gone already. Diggle learned first aid on the battlefield and Felicity, well... She’s had a lot of practice patching up Oliver.

She’s had to learn to close her eyes and her ears, to move past the weeping mothers and the screaming children, because if she stopped for every one she would lose it. Felicity isn’t dulled to it, not even when tragedy is everywhere, but she knows her own limits and she knows that if she tries to soothe every stranger’s hurt that she’ll absorb it all into herself until she can’t go on. 

Felicity helps when she can. She has to accept when she can’t.

She still thinks that someone might come, that she will look up into the sky and see helicopters, that they haven’t been abandoned.

But she doesn’t even know if there is any help out there to be given. For all she knows, the rest of the world looks just like this.

And if it doesn’t... Felicity knows better than to believe anyone will come to the rescue of Starling City.

-

They pick their way through the broken streets, slowly and carefully. The stores they came across, the ones that are still mostly standing, have all been looted but they dig through for anything they can use. A flashlight, an opened bag of chips, a bottle of water.

One night they sleep in an alley behind what used to be a Chinese restaurant. The air smells like soot and char and death but it smells like that everywhere. 

Felicity shivers and Diggle gives her his jacket. She wraps herself up in it but curls into his broad chest anyway. He feels warmer than any jacket ever could.

“Do you think Oliver...” Felicity says, unable to go on.

“Yeah,” Diggle says anyway, like he knows exactly what she’s thinking. He probably does. “Yeah, I do.”

When the silence stretches Felicity says, “I mean, he survived the island.”

“Apocalypse would be old hat to Oliver,” Diggle finishes, and Felicity knows he feels the same as she does.

Oliver has to live. Oliver is _theirs._ Oliver is their only constant and if he can survive, anything is possible.

-

They find a car with half a tank of gas. It still runs. The streets are messed up but Diggle says he’s driven in Iraq; he can drive through anything.

They get in and just drive. They don’t have a plan and they don’t know where they’re going. Felicity thinks they’ll drive until they find something. What that is, she isn’t sure.

Maybe it’s Oliver. Maybe they’ll drive and drive and then there he’ll be, safe with his mother and sister.

Maybe. Maybe not. Felicity thinks they’ll know what they’re looking for when they find it.

She just has to believe.

**_End_ **


End file.
